Full detail of Daily Mail/Al-Megrahi Poll

Well, the full detail of the Scotland-only 1,078 sample size poll from DailyMail/YouGov is now out and the Nationalists who were holding out for a silver lining after the initial bad news will perhaps not be best pleased.

The independence question was, as far as I can make out, identical to the question that Alex Salmond would happily have as part of a referendum.

For whatever reason be it RBS' and HBOS' remarkable fall from grace, the Al-Megrahi decision or recent attempts to redefine what Britishness is, the people of Scotland do not want to be independent.

28% in favour of independence compared with 57% against does not leave much wiggle room, even for a man of Salmond's indisputable talents.(32% say Alex is the best FM to Iain Gray's 12%)

As for voting intentions, we have:

Westminster

Labour - 33%
SNP - 25%
Tory - 19%
Lib Dem - 16%

I don't have my Westminster spreadsheet to translate this into seats but I don't think I need to say that the SNP would be miles away from getting their coveted 20 MPs with that national breakdown.

Per Electoral Calculus, it would be Lab - 38, Lib Dems - 11 (!), SNP - 7, Tory - 3.

Infact, only 4 Scottish seats would change hands in what would be the dullest of dull evenings for an election night. (Ochil, Edinburgh South, Dumfries & Galloway and *whisper it* Glasgow East)

"Were you up for Nigel Griffiths?" we could say. It's just not the same somehow (although if Grifftihs is a specific Tory target, does that make it a decapitation strategy or a castration one? Ouch.)

For Holyrood, we have:

Constituency vote:

SNP - 33%
Labour - 31%
Tory - 16%
Lib Dem - 16%

Regional vote:

Labour - 28%
SNP - 27%
Tory - 17%
Lib Dem - 15%
Greens - 6%

It would be another wafer-thin election between the SNP and Labour if it was held in the short term (not an impossibility with potential no-confidence motions looming) and the Greens remain on that nervy 6% threshold where they could finish with 10 MSPs or 2 MSPs if they finish up a percentage point or down respectively.

The Tories and the Lib Dems are in similar positions to 2007 so they would presumably be neither scared of nor incentivised by a potential snap election. Indeed, if Tavish and Iain could carve up a pre-election coalition deal, I would almost recommend they go for it.

On Megrahi, it's not all bad given the public perception is not too far off 50/50 at 42% for and 51% against. I say 'not all bad' but that's save for the fact that a fairly whopping 69% of people think that Scotland's reputation has diminished as a result of the Justice Secretary's decision. That stays at a high 50% amongst SNP voters alone.

So a fairly bad poll. It's not a body blow, merely a kick in the shins, and in a funny way the SNP Ministers may even perversely wear these polling results as a badge of honour.

Pleasing merely half of the people is the inevitable consequence that so often comes with being in power and having to take the hard decisions so as the dust settles and tempers cool a different picture is perhaps as likely to emerge as this picture remaining into the mid-term.

But is it just me, or did we unknowingly, unexpectedly and not a little bit unexcitedly just enter the 2011 election cycle...?


Game on.



EDIT: I don't tend to read the 'Political Party Identification' section of the poll but I did this time and noted it had 469 Labour members. That's from a total sample of 1,078 and equates to 44% of the population.

Given there are 18,800 Labour members in Scotland, 0.376% of the population, is this a whopper of bias in the poll or am I reading it wrong?

Crucially, there were 166 'Other' members noted (presumably mostly SNP) with 15,000 across Scotland.

So if 18,800 Labour members are represented by 469 sample individuals and 15,000 SNP members are represented by only 166 sample individuals, maybe this poll can be discarded as somewhat biased after all...? Or am I 'over-reaching'?


Anyway, I'm off to the Bloggers Meet. Cheers...!